Hannity & Colmes Spends Full Hour Smearing Obama Via His Pastor

The stock market has been tanking, the price of gas is soaring, there’s a home mortgage crisis and there’s no end in sight to the war in Iraq, but FOX News’ prime time debate show, Hannity & Colmes, spent the full hour last night (3/14/08) attacking Barack Obama's pastor and, by extension, Obama, himself. White supremacist sympathizer Sean Hannity gloated that this issue will cost Obama the presidency and demanded that he step down from the Senate. In response, we think that Hannity’s bigotry should cost him a spot in Al Sharpton’s commemoration of Martin Luther King’s death. With video.

Just to make sure the viewers put Obama together with his pastor, the show opened with a photo of Obama and Wright smiling together. Next, a clip of one of Wright’s controversial sermons was played. In what sounded like a scripted introduction, Alan Colmes called it “just the tip of the iceberg” and added that “FOX has obtained hours of tapes with many more controversial comments and here is some more excerpts of other portions you probably have not yet seen or read about.” That was followed by almost a minute and a half more of excerpts from Wright.

As it often does, FOX News chose a guest with a dubiousrecordon racialissues, Neal Boortz, to attack Obama. The Democratic guest was Tanya Acker. I was critical of Acker in an earlier post but she was magnificent last night. Boortz and Hannity, who love to dish it out, once again proved they can’t take it. They quickly turned sulky and peevish in the wake of her unapologetic advocacy. Acker is our latest top dog.

Acker, who is African American, pointed out that Obama has disavowed Wright's views. Then she added, “Let’s not have such a short memory about things. There’s a Christian university in the south, Bob Jones University, that used to ban interracial dating, that said that God intended segregation of the races. Ronald Reagan defended that university and George W. Bush spoke there.” She also said, “Just like we can’t assume that John McCain believes that the Catholic Church is the great whore, as Reverent Hagee did and Reverend Hagee endorsed him, I don’t think we should assume that Barack Obama embraces these views and he’s expressly disavowed them.”

That must have pierced Boortz’ notoriously thin skin (he has repeatedly sent his fans to flood this website). Boortz said, “Well, first of all I think it’s a little pathetic that all of a sudden this became about John McCain and Ronald Reagan.” Maybe Boortz thought that because he was on FOX, he’d be able to attack without impediment.

Acker jumped in and said, “We’re talking about association. That’s what we’re talking about. So if you want to talk about what’s pathetic, why don’t you focus on our history of examining people and associations and how we looked at Barack Obama… I bet you gave George W. Bush a free pass when he spoke at Bob Jones, which would have prevented me, or said that I would have been expelled if I dated a white man. That’s what’s pathetic. Your one-sidedness is pathetic.”

Ooh, that uppity black woman must have scared bullyboy Sean Hannity. One hour devoted to smearing Obama wasn’t enough for this white supremacist sympathizer. So Hannity interrupted Colmes and said, “Can Neal get a word in here? Neal go ahead.”

Acker was too much for the sensitive smearmeister, Boortz, too. “Sean, look, it’s OK. That is Tanya’s tactic…. I get a sentence out of my mouth and all of a sudden Chatty Cathy is at it again.”

“No, she can’t,” Boortz said. “Of course she can’t. It’s not her style.”

Boortz went on to claim he wasn’t assigning the views of his pastor to Obama.

“I am,” Hannity said, gleefully.

Boortz continued by bashing Obama anyway. “Look at his history of associations. In college, he had an affinity for Marxist professors. You have Bill Ayers of the Weather Underground. You have Jeremiah Wright.”

With a note of triumph in his voice, Boortz said, “We got critical mass today and finally Barack Obama had to step forward, bite the bullet and kick him to the curb.”

Hannity gloated over what he thinks is the success of his attack machine. “I think this is going to end his presidential run or any chance he has to win, Neal. And I want to go through a list here why there’s greater culpability than he wants to admit.” After running through the “evidence” against Obama (the church gave an award to Louis Farrakhan, etc.), Hannity pointed his pudgy finger in the air and yelled, “There is no excuse! Not only, Neal Boortz, is he unfit to be a Senator, he is certainly unfit to be president.”

But that wasn’t enough punishment for Hannity. He continued, “Not only is he not fit to be president, he ought to have to resign, like Trent Lott, from his U.S. Senate seat.”

After nearly three years of blogging about Hannity & Colmes, this was by far the most upsetting edition I have seen. It actually made me cry for the state of our country and the state of our media. I hope to post more about this show later in the weekend. I've got the video of Obama's response in my previous post.